Jannis Völker | basysKom GmbH

basysKom Application Development

Author: Jannis Völker

Jannis Völker is a software engineer at basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt. After joining basysKom in 2017, he has been working in connectivity projects for embedded devices, Azure based cloud projects and has made contributions to open62541 and the Qt OPC UA module of which he is the current maintainer. He has a background in embedded Linux, Qt and OPC UA and holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt.

Revisiting NodeOPCUA

Jannis Völker
December 10, 2024

The NodeOPCUA library is a very mature OPC UA implementation for TypeScript/JavaScript on the Node.js platform. Since the initial release eleven years ago, it has been continuously updated and extended by the main developer and various external contributors. Read this article to learn if NodeOPCUA might be the right OPC UA stack for your next project.

OPC UA: Programming against Type Descriptions

Jannis Völker
July 11, 2024

OPC UA client code that relies on hardcoded NodeIds is brittle and often only works with a specific OPC UA server instance. This article shows the proper way to write robust and portable OPC UA client code.

Qt OPC UA – Data Type Code Generation

Jannis Völker
September 19, 2023

The type system of OPC UA permits the creation of complex and nested data types. With the merge of the generic struct decoding and encoding feature, the Qt OPC UA module has greatly improved the comfort of handling such types. But for large projects with lots of custom data types, its QVariant based interface might still feel a bit too complicated.

Generic Struct Handling is Coming to Qt OPC UA

Jannis Völker
September 14, 2023

OPC UA servers often use structured data types, for example when they are implementing a companion specification or exposing custom structured data types from a PLC program. Up to now, Qt OPC UA was just returning a binary blob when reading such a value and the decoding was left entirely to the user. Since OPC UA 1.04, there is a standardized way for a server to expose the data type description for custom data types. We have extended Qt OPC UA to use this information to make it much easier to encode and decode custom data types. The following article introduces the new API.

What is Apache Avro compared to Protobuf

Jannis Völker
March 25, 2021

Apache Avro is a framework for data serialization by Apache Hadoop. It is mainly used in big data processing but how does it compare to protobuf? Lets take a look.

Support for PEM in the open62541 OpenSSL plugin

Jannis Völker
September 3, 2020

basysKom recently extended this plugin to also accept PEM-based input. PEM is a file format used for certificates and keys which is specified by an RFC and is a preferred format for a lot of open source software. The pull request has been merged and our contribution is available from the 1.1 branch (and will also hit the master branch soon).

Connect OPC UA with open62541 to MS Azure IoT Hub

Jannis Völker
July 2, 2020

The open62541 OPC UA stack with its Pub-Sub extension now supports MQTT over TLS as well as MQTT-brokers requiring a login (contributed by basysKom). This allows the direct communication between open62541 and the Azure IoT Hub and therefore highly simplifies the connection of OPC UA based IoT Devices to the cloud.

IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service, bring your IoT Devices into the Cloud. (Part 4 of 4)

Jannis Völker
May 20, 2020

The Device Provisioning Service is a managed service running in the Azure cloud which supports automatic provisioning of IoT devices for IoT Hub. The following sections will give a short introduction to the most important features of the Device Provisioning Service.

How to consume Protobuf messages in Azure Functions (Part 3 of 4)

Jannis Völker
May 19, 2020

In the third part of our series, we show how Protobuf messages from the IoT Hub can be processed in Azure Functions.

Protobuf for IoT: Sending cost-optimized into the cloud (Part 2 of 4)

Jannis Völker
May 18, 2020

Protobuf is a great choice to transfer data from a IoT device into the cloud. This blog will show you what Protobuf is, how it can be used with C++ and Javascript and how to handle updates without breaking backwards compatibility.